At Cannes: Fair Game — Can This Marriage (and This Movie) Be Saved?

Doug Liman's Fair Game -- about the CIA agent Valerie Plame and the byzantine goings-on surrounding her infamous outing -- underscores the incredibly weak selection of competition films this year at Cannes.

For those of us who paid attention throughout the Bush administration, watching Fair Game will come off as one big yawn. Granted, it's a tough gig, directing a film about real-life events without either factually botching the movie or making it so soupy-dramatic that the end product hardly matches the events itself. Liman should have been up for the task: He's directed some decent films -- Go, Swingers, and The Bourne Identity -- but this time out, he seems to care little about the talent needed to direct actors.

Without rehashing the incidents we all remember well, Liman seemed to have been attracted to the story in part because of the supposed interest in the relationship between Plame (the ubiquitous Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn). The problem is that the relationship is one-dimensional: Saint Valerie works a lot, Intellectual Joe doesn't. Can this marriage be saved? Do we care?

At the press conference, Liman said, "We didn't come to this film as a political movie, but really as a story of two incredible characters who found themselves at the middle of a massive political scandal."

Not like you'd know that from the film. Yes, the Bush administration was filled with nefarious, neocon sycophants who knowingly broke the law in order to justify the war in Iraq. We've been through these series of events and watched every cable news show on the said events; we've read all the books. The jury is in -- we don't need yet another didactic film telling us what we already know.

The film's pacing mirrors short, choppy sentences. Valerie loves her job at the CIA. She's blonde and cute(r thanks to Naomi Watts). Joe Wilson went to Niger. Doesn't find any yellow cake. It pisses off the White House. They try to smear him and his wife. Scooter Libby was charged and convicted. Karl Rove should have been. Game over. Movie over. Can we all go home now?

Not if Liman has anything to say about it. Again, he pinpoints the characters as the film's raison d'etre: "Valerie Plame was this incredibly fascinating spy; we got to know her and understand what it means in this day age to be a secret agent." No, we didn't. Trouble is, in the first quarter of the film, Plame seems to be simply flying off to one location after the next, lying the entire time. Is that really why being a covert agent was all about? The viewer gets no real insight into how spies operated in the early aughts.

Perhaps now isn't the time when most people will want to see this film. "This story will be fascinating in a hundred years," said Liman.

I'll definitely catch it in 2110. Maybe I'll change my mind.